1. I have a few thoughts on Atlantis and other "lost" civilizations, ancient mound builders, Abraham Lincoln, Ezra Pound, the anthropologist Leo Frobenius, West African art and space aliens. Maybe also Jack Kirby.
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8. I think it's the Lovecraftian tradition that wedded the idea of ancient advanced civilizations with the science fiction conceit of alien visitations (from either other planets or dimensions). The up-lifting advanced white civilization became the advanced alien civilization
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9. I think with the creation of Black Panther in 1966, Jack Kirby was trying to see if this rather dismal tradition could be repurposed to anti-racist ends, with the role of the advanced hidden civilization being taken by Wakanda, a black nation.
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10. As a science fiction or pulp conceit, the idea of ancient astronauts is fun. But I do think people who palm it off as an actual theory (i.e von Däniken) are doing a lot of harm: poisoning our ability to appreciate these ancient cultures on their own terms.
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11. At bottom, these theories always show a fundamental failure of imagination: an inability to believe that there existed human communities outside the western tradition who created strange, wonderful, complex artifacts, sometimes beyond our skills.
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Get to the aliens part
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I'm waiting to see how Jack Kirby fits into this.
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More likely Frobenius drew on people like Haggard, whose King Solomon's Mines and She long predate Frobenius' work.
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Robert E Howard's Solomon Kane also fits into this.
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